Pity the Radical

Pity the radical. For every radical, there’s always someone more radical still, someone who plays “more radical than thou” with greater skill.

Recent New Testament scholarship has highlighted the “counter-imperial” import of the gospel. In some ways, this is a healthy recovery of the political resonances of the New Testament, but too often these interpretations ignore or neutralize contrary evidence (often using the tools of historical criticism). For Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza ( The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire ), however, the problem with the anti-imperial readings is that they are insufficiently critical of the New Testament itself.

She finds anti-imperial interpreters like Horsley far too conservative. Writers like Horsley “have highlighted the interplay of religion and politics in the emperor cult, identified the imperial cross-cultural patronage system, and elaborated Paul’s counterimperial gospel, which is regarded as being patterned after but totally different from the gospel of Caesar.” But these works fail to see that “even resistance literature will re-inscribe the structures of domination against which it seeks to argue.”

For feminist post-colonial critics like Schussler Fiorenza, “the anti-imperial approach, like the ‘new perspective,’ still remains within the traditional Protestant paradigm, which uncritically accepts Paul’s rhetorical self-construction and continues to celebrate Paul as an heroic individual and great the*logian [her asterisk], but now no longer constructs him over and against Judaism but over and against the political domination and religious paganism of the Roman Empire.” She rightly chides anti-imperial readers of Paul for trying “to eliminate all Pauline statements to the contrary,” all the statements in Paul’s letters that seem to support rather than subvert empire: “anti-imperial biblical scholarship cannot grasp the imperial ideology at work in early Christian writings, such as in Paul’s letters or the book of Revelation.” Schussler Fiorenza takes “radical democracy” as her standard, and looks for biblical support for her program. She searches for “traces of a scriptural rhetoric that can inspire the resistance to empire.” We cannot assume that Scripture is anti-imperial, but instead have to “identify the languages of empire and its death-dealing ideologies inscribed in scriptures” and also “identify biblical visions and values that would contribute to a radical democratic understanding of society and religion.”

For instance, in an intriguing discussion of the book of Revelation, Schussler Fiorenza denies that the “gendered figurations” of the two cities are more about empire than about “wo/men” [her slash mark]. She worries that dualistic readings the set the bride and harlot in binary opposition are actually “imperial” readings, binary oppositions being inherently conflictual and domineering. But she notes that imperial language disturbingly reasserts itself positively in the book: “The anti-language of Revelation asserts: empire does not belong to Rome but to the followers of the Lamb. They have been constituted as a basileia, as an empire in the redemption from the slavery of empire through Christ. Hence, they now have imperial rule over the earth (1:6; 5:10) and as citizens of the new Jerusalem, they will reign forever (22:5).” Schussler Fiorenza is especially worried that this “anti-language” might become internalized in such a way that it “determines the self-understanding of Christians today.” If Christians were to embrace this “imperial self-understanding,” they would project “evil onto the ‘others’ who do not follow Christ, the poor, the prostitutes, homosexuals, the feminists, and other powerful or objectified wo/men.”